Yesterday we were told not to worry about Lucas Duda’s balky back that he was rested yesterday to spare him a long bus ride and he will be good to go today when the team buses to Viera (90 min trip) to meet the Nats. Well, Duda wasn’t on that bus and will sit out again today.

David Wright we were told will take a day or two off with some discomfort in his rib cage, nothing serious just a precaution. Wright has yet to play this week.

Pedro Beato has some soreness in the rotator cuff but it’s nothing serious a little rest and he should be fine.

Scott Hairston still has not responded to treatment of his re-strained oblique muscle and it looks like he will not start the season on the 25 man roster making a tissue thin bench even thinner.

But don’t worry we’re told, it’s early in spring these are little nagging things that will work its way out. In the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in there was an old saying “Don’t worry is doing 15 years in Sing Sing”

This is why Mets fans hang and cringe on every pitch that Johan Santana throws as we know it’s just a matter of time before his arm falls off.

Can a team use the disabled list for players that have a psychological injury? I ask this because if you can, Jason Bay is a candidate for shutdown. Reading the stories on how Bay is placing his feet differently in the batter’s box and thinking so much about his approach at the plate to where he knows he needs to be more selective and lay off pitches off the plate it just seems his biggest problem is he’s thinking too much and not reacting at all at the plate. It seems he spends his at bats thinking about 1,001 ways to get a hit and while his head is filled with all this distraction, he’s become absent minded to reaction to pitches. That Capt Kirk/Jason Bay platoon in left field looks better and better every day.

When did Omar Minaya become the GM of the NY Jets? So Eli Manning coming off a Super Bowl win, the second of his career and his second Super Bowl MVP award restructures his contract down instead of asking for a well-deserved raise so his team has money to sign players that will help the Giants add to their trophy case while the Jets extend the contract of Mark Sanchez whose leadership qualities are questioned in his own locker room. Stunning.

I’m not saying you can’t win a Super Bowl with Mark Sanchez, you can, but you have to have a plan and signing free agents with questionable character is not the way to do. Rex Ryan preached “ground and pound” but the Jets do not practice that mantra. It still amazes me how Mike Tannenbaum stays below the Jets fans radar, if I were a Jets fan I’d want him fired.

For all of us Mets fans who want the Skill Sets to sell the team, let’s be careful what we wish for. If the Mets were up for sale, Jim Dolan and his Cablevision billions will be front and center with a bid. Now if I knew Dolan would treat the Mets like he does the Rangers, it wouldn’t be too bad but if he’s hands on like he is with the Knicks that would be an unmitigated disaster.

The Mets need another Nelson Doubleday to take over ownership of this team. I found this article from the New York Observer from October 30th 2000, right after the Subway World Series, that details how Doubleday and Freddy Skill Sets had opposite views on how the direction of the team and of Shea Stadium.

In the beginning, Doubleday Publishing owned 95 percent of the team. Mr. Doubleday gained a reputation as a hands-off owner who let general manager Frank Cashen make all the baseball decisions. The strategy paid off in 1986, when a Mets team filled with young players cultivated by Mr. Cashen won the World Series

And when it came to Shea Stadium, Nelly D was in favor of renovation to save money and to preserve Shea:

Mr. Wilpon’s allies maintained that the stadium controversy was just a misunderstanding. Mr. Doubleday, they say, simply did not know the status of Mr. Wilpon’s negotiations. That may be true, but Mr. Doubleday apparently hasn’t changed his mind. “I’m not particularly interested in seeing a whole lot of taxpayer money going into a New York Mets fancy-dancy stadium,” Mr. Doubleday told The Observer while watching batting practice before Game 3 on Oct. 24. “We could [renovate Shea Stadium] over three years, section by section. This is a pretty nice place to play ball.”

I don’t know how much of Doubleday’s wanting to renovate Shea rather than build Citi was more his love of Shea or using that money to better the on field product or if it was just Nelly breaking Freddy’s balls. Either way I like Doubleday’s style.

Attention New York Rangers Fans: Keep Calm, Carry On Coach Torts will get this team to “Fuckin’ screw it on straight”

It will be tough to read any Mets news this week as NYC has turned its sports eye to this Sunday’s Super Bowl (with a squint at Madison Square Garden as Knicks fans await the firing of coach Mike D’Antoni and Mike Woodson taking over for the season) and the over saturation of information that will come out of Indianapolis all week. One of the more interesting aspects of this fountain of information is the two sports radio station in town going head to head on Radio Row.

WEPN has never made a dent in the ratings and as the Great Sports Pope, Mike Francesa likes to say, “Dey cum ta wawr wit pea shootas” .WEPN’s biggest problem is they can’t decide if they want to be national sports radio broadcasting in NYC or a hybrid National/Local station. To be honest here, I’ve kind of weaned my way off WFAN. I’ll listen to the station at work but when I’m in the car I’ll listen to Sirius/XM radio, mostly MLB Radio.

As much as I would love to listen to someone other than Francesa, when I tune into the Michael Kay Show it’s the sports talk equivalent to fingers nails on a chalk board. What make it worse is I really like Don LaGreca and I’ve always felt he was being wasted as a second banana on the Kay show.

When you look at the WEPN line up, it’s no wonder it gets miniscule ratings. Even though Mike and Mike is an ESPN infomercial, I kind of enjoy listening to them but again they are a National show which makes it more puzzling why they follow M & M with the totally unlistenable Colin Cowherd, again another National show. At 12 noon the station puts on its best effort of the day in airing Ryan Ruocco and Robin Lundburg. Ruocco and Lundburg are young and come with a fresher, hipper way of doing sports talk that is quite refreshing, the problem is they only get two hours of air time as at 2pm WEPN turns into old foggey radio with the Mike Lupica Show. Lupica has not been relevant on the New York sport scene in about 10 years when he was at least watching sporting events on television (stories were all around that Lupey never attended games he wrote about it seems he’s beneath siting in a press box) what line of thinking is going through WEPN program director Dave Roberts head that he feels an hour of Lupey is better radio than an extra hour of Ruocco and Lundberg?

Sure it’s a tough task to overtake WFAN in the ratings as they are the founding fathers of sports talk radio not just in NYC but the country but it can be done if you go out a get younger hosts who are social media savvy who can talk about multiple subjects instead of beating listeners to death with Rex Ryan coaching critiques and 1960’s Yankees retrospectives. WEPN is missing a great opportunity to reach hockey fans by not giving LaGreca a weekend hockey show especially with the station airing NY Rangers games. Same for doing an NBA show. I know Stephen (Screamin’) A. Smith can polarized listeners but he is in tune with the NBA and by paring him up with the underutilized and underrated Larry Hardesty I’m sure they would move the rating needle north.

When you think about it here we live in a city that is sports crazy with multiple teams in four major sports but we don’t have a decent sports talk radio station to listen to. Sad, don’t you think?

I had a thought this morning while I was reading two interesting sports stories the fish wraps , which organization was in worse shape, the NY Mets or the NY Jets? In my estimation, it’s the Jets.

I put the question out there in Twitter-land and no one in my time line agreed with me, in fact I got a lot of “The Islanders are worst of all” which may be true (see DiPietro, Rick franchise wrecking contract) but with the stories today that the Jets players feel that QB Mark Sanchez is a lazy piece of shit and has a sense of entitlement and the Wilpon’s look to be getting a cash infusion of $100mil with the sale of minority shares in the club, it made we wonder which team is worse shape?

The responses I received all dealt with money, Woody Johnson’s got it and Fred Wilpon doesn’t, I can’t argue with that. While the Jets are definitely the more monetarily rich team the Mets are wealthier organizationally.

As much as Mets fans focus (obsess?) over the financial failures of the Skill Sets, the situation would be much worse if the Mets had a Mike Tannenbaum/Rex Ryan first line of management than the stronger Sandy Alderson/Terry Collins front line.

How Mike Tannenbaum escapes the Jets fans wrath is beyond me. Tannenbaum’ highlight in his resume is that he is a capologist , which means he’s an expert on the NFL salary cap as a GM in charge of putting a team together he’s not a good mixoligist, and please spare me the two AFC Championship games the Jets have gone to, let’s look at the big picture, after this season as a Jets fan can you truly feel your team is headed in the right direction? I didn’t think so.

We Mets fans know this sale of minority shares is just a blip on the Skill Set financial failure radar. If anything, it buys them some time to pay off some loans that are due or past due such as the loan from MLB with a little leftover capital to bring in a pitcher or two. If you are going to have a payroll that keeps dropping like the temperature on a February night, you would want to have a guy running your team that not only has the experience with this kind of situation but has been successful at it like Sandy Alderson.

See the Jets were the team with the high expectations and the head coach who spends more time bloviating than getting a handle on the pulse of his locker room. Terry Collins learned from his past failures as a field boss and last season did as good a job with a team that was hit by injury and without strong reinforcement from the minor league system than anyone could have hoped for. Ryan could take a lesson from Collins on how to reign in a clubhouse. Ryan has always been looked at as the ultimate players coach but what he truly is, is a coach who doesn’t know how to instill discipline or to be the adult in the room.

Woody Johnson seems to be suffering from the same malaise that the Skill Sets suffered from during the Madoff halcyon days when the cash flowed like water; he and his Jets brain trust have no clue on how to spend it. Just as the Mets were awful at building their organization the right way, through player development, the Jets operate the same way, when you bring in guys like Santonio Holmes for big money that you can’t get rid of and Plaxico Burress another bad attitude and team wrecker as we Giants fans saw when he refused to work with Eli Manning during the off season at OTA’s and is not a franchise receiver, you find yourself in a deep hole just like the Mets used be in when they would reward players with big money for long terms for performances they achieved with other teams.

That’s why the Skill Sets not having money to spend may turn out to be a blessing for the Mets organization as the philosophy of the team has gone back to what had made the Mets good in the 60’s and 80’s, player development. I know many Mets fans don’t have the patience for a rebuilding program but quite frankly it’s been overdue.

It’s tough to spend time on Mets minutia today with trying to finish up loose ends at work and get ready for what should be one of the best nights Madison Square Garden has seen in quite a while as the Rangers and Flyers meet tonight and the Giants-Jets get together tomorrow and the Knicks-Celtics start the NBA season on Christmas, it’s hard to get worked up over Rob Johnson signing a minor league deal to fight for a backup catcher spot with the Mets .

I am pumped up for tonight’s Rangers-Flyers match up at MSG. Between the way the Rangers have been playing along with all the hype of HBO’s 24/7 (I need to tape Coach Tortorella’s between periods ass ripping of his team against the St Louis Blues last week “Fucking screw it on straight, screw it on and let’s get ready to go each shift” has become my new mantra I’ve been using it at work all day the non-hockey fans think I’ve lost my mind but then again most of them don’t know what to make of me anyway) and Winter Classic and first place (though very early in the season ) on the line, I can’t wait to get to the Garden tonight.

For as long as I can remember as a NY Football Giants fan, I have never given the NY Jets much thought. Sure I have friends who are Jets fans but there has never the animosity like I have with buddies and relatives who root for the Bronx Bastards. The Jets were…. Well just the Jets. They played in the other conference and since they played each other, except for every 4 years, only in the preseason there really hasn’t been any reason to have an opinion positive or negative on the Jets. Until now.

It really hurts me to write this but there are four teams in NYC that are sports royalty, The Highlanders, Giants, Knicks and Rangers. The Mets are the closest of the underling teams that could break into the big four, but not these days. For all the bluster that comes from Rex Ryan, the Jets are not close to being in the same stratosphere as the NY Football Giants. I don’t dislike Rex Ryan although he really, really needs to shut the fuck up, I do respect his coaching acumen but it’s too bad he has to take the personality of his dad Buddy because all this hot air he spews sooner or later has to be backed up with something. Sure he has had success as HC of the Jets but he needs to mind his coaching manners.

Head coaches, no matter what always show respect to one and other in public (look at the fall out from the Jim Schwatrz, Jim Haurbugh brew ha ha earlier this season) it’s great that Rex thinks that he is better that Bill Belichick or Tom Coughlin but when you disrespect these men who have accomplished more than you ever had in this game, you come off like a fucking buffoon.

Neither team in this contest has much to crow about this season. Both teams are huge disappointments with flaws a plenty and as much as Tom Coughlin has told his players to let the Jets do the talking and keep their mouths shut, when you have motor mouths like Antrell Rolle and Brandon Jacobs it’s a hard to rein them in.

Like I say I never gave the Jets much thought but thanks to Rex’s big mouth not only do I want to see the Giants beat the living shit out them, if the Jets make the playoffs, I’ll be rooting hard against them. By the way, all Giants fan should be thanking Rex and his players for doing what Coach Coughlin has had trouble with so far this second half of the season, motivating the Giants players. Rex should have gone with the let sleeping dogs lay but after seeing how the Jets put a picture of a bleeding Eli Manning on the cover of their defensive play book, I hope JPP knocks Mark Sanchez out of the game on the first offensive play from scrimmage. Oh and Fireman Ed is an asshole.

Celtics-Knicks is a great way to start off Christmas Day and as a fan of the C’s, it’s good to see the Knickerbockers relevant again. I am my Celtics have one more run left in them and a good start would be by beating up the Knicks on Sunday.

A few quick hits as my workload is piling up and next week is a real shorty for me:

I guess I’m numb to MLB screwing with the game that I’m not upset over the adding of a second wild card, maybe as soon as this coming season. In fact as a Mets fan, I should be ecstatic about it as it gives the team a better chance to reach the organizations goal of “meaningful games in September”.

I would even go further even further with the destruction of what was once sacred the 162 games season and a true league champion, and abolish the division structure and make two 15 team leagues and have the first 8 teams make the playoffs. I guess it’s the NHL/ (defunct) NBA fan in me that would like to see this. Cut the season to 148 or 150 games and start 1 plays 8, 2 play 7 and so on, 7 game series. You’d have to have a balanced schedule, which you should anyway with a wild card spot in play, and with 15 teams per league, there has to be an interleague game every day. Hey can’t have anything but anything that gets the Mets closer to a post season berth gets my vote.

As we get closer to Thanksgiving I just want to say how thankful I am that I am not a fan of the NY Jets. Being a Mets fan is agonizing enough but I really feel for the Mets/Jets fan of which they are plentiful. With that said, Dirty Sanchez sucks, Rex needs to shut the fuck up and Brian Schottenheimer makes the awful Kevin Gilbride look like Vince Lombardi in his heyday as NY Giants OC. By the way, for all the insults hurled at Tim Teabow, he may not be a work of art and statistically unimpressive but the results are there as the Broncos are tied for the AFC West lead with Oakland. Who’da think it Teabow in the playoffs and Dirty Sanchez on the couch.

Rumors were flying again yesterday that Jose Reyes signed with the Flamboyant Fish but those rumors seem premature but it looks like the Mets are going forward in the post-Reyes era by letting it known that #Imwith28 will be given the 2nd base job and team with Ruben Tejeda to secure the middle infield. In the name of the father…… The major problem with #Imwith28 is his two best spots on defense are filled by I Like Ike at 1B and D-Wright at 3rd. Too bad #Imwith28 wasn’t a catcher, hummmmm there’s an idea.

Chris Jaffe informs us this morning that today is the 25th Anniversary of Freddy Skill Sets becoming the sole owner of the New York Mets buying the rest of Nelson (make mine a) Doubleday controlling interest. In his column, Jaffe, informs us that the Mets have played just a tad over .500 ball since Freddy’s takeover (2,017-1,962 1962? Oh the irony) but have an overall losing record since 1989. Enjoy your Monday.

Look, I’m a fan of the New York Football Giants and you’re a fan of the NY Jets and we’re both upset today after how our teams fared yesterday but my question to you today is would you be surprised if the Patriots won the Super Bowl? I wouldn’t unless of course their played the Giants in the big game ‘cause the G-Men got the Pats number. Oh and how about BB HC of NEP telling the J-E-T-S defense to felaite him? Oh my!

By the way, as bad as Jets strength and condition coach Sal Alosi’ un-sportsman like move, tripping Nolan Carroll as he went down the side line on a punt return was, the cries for Alosi to be fired is comical. The NFL allows players who are convicted of DUI’s and vehicular homicide to thrive in the league but a coach doing something stupid should be burned at the stake. If MLB operated like the NFL, The Used Car Salesman would be America’s number one villain. Maybe the NY Daily News Eye-Sore Team will stop wasting newsprint on the steroid witch hunt and do some real investigative reporting on the NFL. Yeah, fat chance.

The Apple gets there Hudgens crossed, one Hudgens is a hitting coach the other gets hit on. By the way that picture of Reyes with the sign is fucking hilarious and the pic of the lovely Vanessa is museum quality.

Sandy Alderson has another thing in common with Mets fans, he won’t go out of his way to watch Oliver Perez pitch. I know there is a lot of talk about using OP as a LOOGY and there may be some merit in that move but Perez and Castillo represent the FAIL of the Minaya administration. Perez not accepting a minor league assignment to work out his pitching problems and Castillo after having a game winning hit last summer and acting like he just had a wisdom tooth pulled is exactly that kind of mindset that has to be eradicated in the Mets clubhouse . I’m on board with the patient Alderson approach but some things just can’t let simmer. Both Perez and Castillo need to be released.

“Hey Davis you suck” “Earn your money Baron”, LA Clipper fans heckling their point guard Baron Davis? Nope. It’s Clippers owner Donald Sterling sitting at courtside at the Staple Center berating his point guard during a game. I can’t get on Sterling too much, if I owned the Mets I’d probably act the same way.

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